Experience Your Creative Vision

Lesley is one of the few low-residency MFA programs whose graduate students work on their scripts with local professional actors and directors. During your first year in the Stage & Screen track, you will write a full-length script in both disciplines. For your second year, you can choose to concentrate in either stage or screen, or you can choose to write another full-length play and another screenplay. Either way, you will leave the program with four full-length scripts and three ten-minute plays. You may write additional scripts (like short screenplays, TV scripts and one-acts) for your Interdisciplinary Studies.

In lieu of a traditional workshop for your fourth semester, you will receive a Play Lab reading where one of your completed full-length plays is presented as a reading to our Stage & Screen students, faculty and the public. In the process, you will work with professional Boston area actors and a director as well as have a consult with that director. Your play presented is also qualified for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.

Many of our students have received productions and publications of their plays and have also placed in screenwriting and TV competitions. Some have even produced their own short films and web series and won awards.

Lesley Stage & Screen Partnerships

Lesley University proudly participates in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACFT) and is a member of The Playwrights’ Center's New Plays on Campus. By being a Lesley Stage & Screen student, you have the opportunity to be recognized as a playwright at both the regional and national levels. Over the last six years, Lesley students have gone on to win three National KCACFT Awards (Paula Vogel, Latino, and Ten-Minute Play Awards) and several regional awards for ten-minute and one act plays.

Sample Residency Seminar Descriptions

Breaking Down Plays Instructor: Ronan NooneWe will measure the tone and structure in a play and how that can determine the narrative trajectory. We will read a scene, noting the major event, character action and reaction and locate what defines the forward motion into the following scene. I hope through some exercises, video, and discussion to illustrate some techniques that can help build our own playscripts.

Contact Us

MFA Writing Faculty Ronan Noone's play, The Second Girl, will be part of the Huntington Theater's 2014-15 season. With Eugene O'Neill's classic Long Day's Journey into Night as a backdrop, The Second Girl is set in the downstairs world of the Tyrone family kitchen in August 1912. Two Irish immigrant servant girls and the chauffeur search for love, success, and a sense of belonging in their new world in this lyrical and poignant world premiere. Read more.

MFA Alum's Play Wins Firehouse New Play Prize

Cassie M. Seinuk's ('13) thesis play FROM THE DEEP is the winner of the 2014 Firehouse Center of The Arts Pestalozzi New Play Prize. Included in the prize were readings at The Firehouse in Newburyport MA and at the Boston University Hillel.